Is life worth living?

Is Life Worth Living?

William Iames

J

K\\y-,\^;-<>:.:, ;x-\\\.

^ez^5d>??

Walsh
Philosophy
Collection

PRESENTED to the

LIBRARIES of the

UNIVERSITY o/TORONTO

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ?

WORKS BY WILLIAM JAMES, M.D., ETC.,

Professor of Psychology in Harvard University.

The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols., 8vo. New York :
Henry Holt & Co. London ; Macmillan & Co. 1890.
^4.80.

Psychology. Briefer Course. lamo. Ibid., 1892. ^1.60.

Is Life Worth Living?

By

William James

PHILADELPHIA

S. BURNS WESTON, 1305 ARCH ST.

1896

1

PUBLISHER'S NOTE.

THE address contained in this book was
originally given before the Young
Men's Christian Association of Harvard
University, in May, 1895. It was after-
wards repeated before the Society for Ethi-
cal Culture of Philadelphia and the School
of Applied Ethics at Plymouth. It was
printed in the International Journal of
Ethics for October, 1895, and, the demand
for it having been so great, we are glad to
have the permission of the author and of
the management of the Journal to republish
it in more convenient form.

The author desires us to add that he
owes his application of the quotation with
which the address closes, to Mr. W. M.
Salter, who used it in a similar way in an
article in the Index for August 24, 1882.

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING ?

WHEN Mr. Mallock's book with this
title appeared some fifteen years
ago, the jocose answer that " it depends on
the liver''' had great currency in the news-
papers. The answer that I propose to give
to-night cannot be jocose. In the words
of one of Shakespeare's prologues,

" I come no more to make you laugh ; things now,
That bear a weighty and a serious brow,
Sad, high, and working, full of state and woe,"

must be my theme. In the deepest heart
of all of us there is a corner in which the
ultimate mystery of things works sadly, and
I know not what such an Association as
yours intends nor what you ask of those
whom you invite to address you, unless it
be to lead you from the surface- glamour of

6 IS LIFE WOR TH LIVING ?

existence and for an hour at least to make
you heedless to the buzzing and jigging and
vibration of small interests and excitements
that form thq^ tissue of our ordinary con-
sciousness. Without further explanation or
apology, then, I ask you to join me in turn-
ing an attention, commonly too unwilling,
to the profounder bass-note of life. Let us
search the lonely depths for an hour to-
gether and see what answers in the last
folds and recesses of things our question
may find.

I.

With many men the question of life's
worth is answered by a temperamental opti-
mism that makes them Incapable of be-
lieving that anything seriously evil can ex-
ist. Our dear old Walt Whitman's works
are the standing text-book of this kind of

IS LIFE WOR TH LIVING ? 7

optimism ; the mere joy of living is so
immense in Walt Whitman's veins that it
abolishes the possibility of any other kind
of feeling.

*

" To breathe the air, how deUcious !

To speak, to walk, to seize something by the hand ! . . .

To be this incredible God I am ! . . .

O amazement of things, even the least particle !

spirituality of things ! . . .

1 too carol the Sun, usher'd or at noon, or as now, setting,
I too throb to the brain and beauty of the earth and of

all the growths of the earth. . . .

t>'

I sing to the last the equalities, modern or old,

I sing the endlef s finales of things,

I say Nature continues glory continues,

I praise with electric voice.

For I do not see one imperfection in the universe.

And I do not see one cause or result lamentable at last."

So Rousseau, writing of the nine years he
spent at Annecy, with nothing but his hap-
piness to tell :

" How tell what was neither said nor done nor even
thought, but tasted only and felt, with no object of my
felicity but the emotion of felicity itself. I rose with the
sun and I was happy ; I went to walk and I was happy ; I

8 JS LIFE WOR TH LIVING ?

saw ' Maman ' and I was happy ; I left her and I was
happy. I rambled through the woods and over the vine-
slopes, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I lounged, I
worked in the garden, I gathered the fruits, I helped at the
indoor work, and happiness followed me everywhere ; it
was in no one assignable thing; it was all within myself;
it could not leave me for a single instant."

If moods like this could be made perma-
nent and constitutions like these universal,
there would never be any occasion for such
discourses as the present one. No philos-
opher would seek to prove articulately that
life is worth living, for the fact that it ab-
solutely is so would vouch for itself and the
problem disappear in the vanishing of the
question rather than in the coming of any-
thing like a reply. But we are not magi-
cians to make the optimistic temperament
universal; and alongside of the deliverances
of temperamental optimism concerning life,
those of temperamental pessimism always
exist and oppose to them a standing refu-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 9

tation. In what is called circular insanity,
phases of melancholy succeed phases of
mania, with no outward cause that we can
discover, and often enough to one and the
same well person life will offer incarnate
radiance to-day and incarnate dreariness to-
morrow, according to the fluctuations of
what the older medical books used to call
the concoction of the humors. In the words
of the newspaper joke, " it depends on the
liver." Rousseau's ill-balanced constitution
undergoes a change, and behold him in his
latter evil days a prey to melancholy and
black delusions of suspicion and fear. And
some men seem launched upon the world
even from their birth with souls as incapa-
ble of happiness as Walt Whitman's was
of gloom, and they have left us their mes-
sages in even more lasting verse than his
the exquisite Leopardi, for example, or our

lo IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

own contemporary, James Thomson, in that
pathetic book, *' The City of Dreadful
Night," which I think is less well-known
than it should be for its literary beauty,
simply because men are afraid to quote its
words they are so gloomy and at the same
time so sincere. In one place the poet
describes a congregation gathered to listen
to a preacher in a great unillumined cathe-
dral at night. The sermon is too long to
quote, but it ends thus :

" O Brothers of sad lives ! they are so brief;
A few short years must bring us all relief:

Can we not bear these years of laboring breath ?
But if you would not this poor life fulfil,

Lo, you are free to end it when you will,
Without the fear of waking after death.

The organ-like vibrations of his voice,

Thrilled through the vaulted aisles and died away ;
The yearning of the tones which bade rejoice

Was sad and tender as a requiem lay :
Our shadowy congregation rested still
As brooding on that ' End it when you will.*

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? ii

Our shadowy congregation rested still,
As musing on that message we had heard

And brooding on that ' End it when you will' ;
Perchance awaiting yet some other word ;

When keen as lightning through a muffled sky

Sprang forth a shrill and lamentable cry :

The man speaks sooth, alas ! the man speaks sooth.
We have no personal life beyond the grave ;

There is no God ; Fate knows nor wrath nor ruth :
Can I find here the comfort which I crave ?

In all eternity I had one chance,

One few years' term of gracious human life :
The splendors of the intellect's advance,

The sweetness of the home with babes and wife ;

The social pleasures with their genial wit ;

The fascination of the worlds of art ;
The glories of the worlds of nature lit

By large imagination's glowing heart ;

The rapture of mere being, full of health ;

The careless childhood and the ardent yotith.
The strenuous manhood winning various wealth.

The reverend age serene with life's long truth :

All the sublime prerogatives of Man ;

The storied memories of the times of old,
The patient tracking of the world's great plan

Through sequences and changes myriadfold.

13 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

This chance was never offered me before ;

For me the infinite past is blank and dumb :
This chance recurreth never, nevermore ;

Blank, blank for me the infinite To-come.

And this sole chance was frustrate from my birth,
A mockery, a delusion ; and my breath

Of noble human life upon this earth

So racks me that I sigh for senseless death.

My wine of life is poison mixed with gall,
My noonday passes in a nightmare dream,

I worse than lose the years which are my all :
What can console me for the loss supreme ?

Speak not of comfort where no comfort is.

Speak not at all : can words make foul things fair ?

Our life's a cheat, our death a black abyss :
Hush, and be mute envisaging despair.

This vehement voice came from the northern aisle
Rapid and shrill to its abrupt harsh close ;

And none gave answer for a certain while,

For words must shrink from these most wordless woes ;

At last the pulpit speaker simply said.

With humid eyes and thoughtful, drooping head,

My Brother, my poor Brothers, it is thus :
This life holds nothing good for us.

But it ends soon and nevermore can be ;
And we knew nothing of it ere our birth.
And shall know nothing when consigned to earth ;

I ponder these thoughts and they comfort me."

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 13

" It ends soon and nevermore can be,"
" Lo, you are free to end it when you will,"
these verses flow truthfully from the
melancholy Thomson's pen, and are in truth
a consolation for all to whom, as to him,
the world is far more like a steady den of
fear than a continual fountain of delight.
That life is not worth living the whole army
of suicides declare an army whose roll-
call, like the famous evening drum-beat of
the British army, follows the sun round the
world and never terminates. We, too, as
we sit here in our comfort, must " ponder
these things " also, for we are of one sub-
stance with these suicides, and their life is
the life we share. The plainest intellectual
integrity, nay, more, the simplest manliness
and honor, forbid us to forget their case.

" If suddenly," says Mr, Ruskin, " in the midst of the
enjoyments of the palate and lightnesses of heart of a Lon-

14 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

don dinner-party, the walls of the chamber were parted, and
through their gap the nearest human beings who were
famishing and in misery were borne into the midst of the
company feasting and fancy free if, pale from death, hor-
rible in destitution, broken by despair, body by body they
were laid upon the soft carpet, one beside the chair of
every guest, would only the crumbs of the dainties be cast
to them would only a passing glance, a passing thought, be
vouchsafed to them ? Yet the actual facts, the real relation
of each Dives and Lazarus, are not altered by the inter-
vention of the house-wall between the table and the sick-
bed by the few feet of ground (how few!) which are,
indeed, all that separate the merriment from the misery."

II.

To come immediately to the heart of my
theme, then, what I propose is to imagine
ourselves reasoning with a fellow-mortal
who is on such terms with life that the only
comfort left him is to brood on the assur-
ance '* you may end it when you will."
What reasons can we plead that may render
such a brother (or sister) willing to take up
the burden again ? Ordinary Christians,

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 15

reasoning with would-be suicides, have httle
to offer them beyond the usual negative
" thou shalt not." God alone is master of
life and death, they say, and it is a blas-
phemous act to anticipate his absolving
hand. But can zve find nothing richer or
more positive than this, no reflections to
urge whereby the suicide may actually see,
and in all sad seriousness feel, that in spite
of adverse appearances even for him life is
worth living still ? There are suicides and
suicides in the United States about three
thousand of them every year and I must
frankly confess that with perhaps the ma-
jority of these my suggestions are impotent
to deal. Where suicide is the result of
insanity or sudden frenzied impulse, reflec-
tion is impotent to arrest its headway; and
cases like these belong to the ultimate mys-
tery of evil concerning which I can only

1 6 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

offer considerations tending towards relig-
ious patience at the end of this hour. My
task, let me say now, is practically narrow,
and my words are to deal only with that
metaphysical tediiini vitce which is peculiar
to reflecting men. Most of you are devoted
for good or ill to the reflective life. Many
of you are students of philosophy, and have
already felt in your own persons the scep-
ticism and unreality that too much grubbing
in the abstract roots of things will breed.
This is, indeed, one of the regular fruits of
the over-studious career. Too much ques-
j tioning and too little active responsibility
lead, almost as often as too much sensual-
ism does, to the edge of the slope, at the
bottom of which lie pessimism and the
nightmare or suicidal view of life. But to
the diseases which reflection breeds, still
further reflection can oppose effective reme-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 17

dies ; and it is of the melancholy and
Weltschmerz bred of reflection that I now
proceed to speak.

Let me say immediately that my final
appeal is to nothing more recondite than
religious faith. So far as my argument
is to be destructive, it will consist in noth-
ing more than the sweeping away of certain
views that often keep the springs of relig-
ious faith compressed ; and so far as it is
to be constructive it will consist in holding
up to the light of day certain considerations
calculated to let loose these springs in a
normal, natural way. Pessimism is essen-
tially a religious disease. In the form of it
to which you are most liable it consists in
nothincr but a relicrious demand to which
there comes no normal religious reply.

Now there are two stages of recovery
from this disease, two different levels upon

i8 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

which one may emerge from the midnight
view to the daylight view of things, and I
must treat of them in turn. The second
stage is the more complete and joyous, and
it corresponds to the freer exercise of relig-
ious trust and fancy. There are, as is well
known, persons who are naturally very free
in this regard, others who are not at all so.
There are persons, for instance, whom we
find indulging to their heart's content in
prospects of immortality, and there are
others who experience the greatest diffi-
culty in making such a notion seem real to
themselves at all. These latter persons are
tied to their senses, restricted to their
natural experience ; and many of them
moreover feel a' sort of intellectual loyalty
to what they call hard facts which is posi-
tively shocked by the easy excursions into
the unseen that they witness other people

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 19

make at the bare call of sentiment. Minds
of either class may, however, be intensely-
religious. They may equally desire atone-
ment, harmony, reconciliation, and crave
acquiescence and communion with the total
Soul of Things. But the craving, when
the mind is pent in to the hard facts, espe-
cially as "Science" now reveals them, can
breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds
optimism when it inspires religious trust
and fancy to wing their way to an other and
a better world.

That is why I call pessimism an essen-
tially religious disease. The nightmare
view of life has plenty of organic sources,
but its great reflective source in these days,
and at all times, has been the contradiction
between the phenomena of Nature and the
craving of the heart to believe that behind
Nature there is a spirit whose expression

20 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

Nature is. What philosophers call natural
theology has been one way of appeasing
this craving. That poetry of nature in which
our English literature is so rich has been
another way. Now suppose a mind of the
latter of our two classes, whose imagination
is pent in consequently, and who takes its
facts " hard ; " suppose it, moreover, to feel
strongly the craving for communion, and
yet to realize how desperately difficult it is
to construe the scientific order of Nature
either theologically or poetically, and what
result can there be but inner discord and
contradiction ? Now this inner discord
(merely as discord) can be relieved in either
of two ways. The longing to read the facts
religiously may cease, and leave the bare
facts by themselves. Or supplementary
facts may be discovered or believed in,
which permit the religious reading to go

IS LIFE IVOR TH LIVING ? 21

on. And these two ways of relief are the
two stages of recovery, the two levels of
escape from pessimism, to which I made
allusion a moment ago, and which w^hat
follows will, I trust, make more clear.

III.

Starting then with Nature, we naturally
tend, if w^e have the religious craving, to
say with Marcus Aurelius, O Universe,
what thou wishest I wish. Our sacred
books and traditions tell us of one God
who made heaven and earth, and looking
on them saw that they were good. Yet,
on more intimate acquaintance, the visible
surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be
brought by us into any intelligible unity at
all. Every phenomena that we would
praise there exists cheek by jowl with some

22 75 LIFE WORTH LIVING?

contrary phenomenon that cancels all its
religious effect upon the mind. Beauty
and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and
death keep house together in indissoluble
partnership ; and there gradually steals
over us, instead of the old warm notion of
a man-loving Deity, that of an awful Power
that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all
things together meaninglessly to a common
doom. This is an uncanny, a sinister, a
nightmare view of life, and its peculiar un-
heimlichkeit or poisonousness lies expressly
in our holding two things together which
cannot possibly agree, in our clinging on
the one hand to the demand that there shall
be a living spirit of the whole, and, on the
other, to the belief that the course of nature
must be such a spirit's adequate manifesta-
tion and expression. It is in the contradic-
tion between the supposed being of a spirit

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 23

that encompasses and owns us and with
which we oucfht to have some communion,
and the character of such a spirit as rev^ealed
by the visible world's course, that this par-
ticular death-in-life paradox and this melan-
choly-breeding puzzle reside. Carlyle ex-
presses the result in that chapter of his
immortal ''Sartor Resartus" entitled The
Everlasting No. " I lived," writes poor
Teufelsdrockh, " in a continual indefinite
pining fear; tremulous, pusillanimous, ap-
prehensive of I knew not what : it seemed
as if all things in the Heavens above and
the Earth beneath would hurt me ; as if
the Heavens and the Earth were but bound-
less Jaws of a devouring Monster, wherein
I, palpitating, lay waiting to be devoured."
This is the first stage of speculative mel-
ancholy. No brute can have this sort of
melancholy, no man that is irreligious can

24 IS LIFE WORTH LIVIJSG?

become its prey. It is the sick shudder of
the frustrated religious demand, and not the
mere necessary outcome of animal experi-
ence. Teufelsdrockh himself could have
made shift to face the general chaos and
bedevilment of this world's experiences very
well were he not the victim of an originally
unlimited trust and affection towards them.
If he might meet them piecemeal, with no
suspicion of any Whole expressing itself in
them, shunning the bitter parts and husband-
ing the sweet ones, as the occasion served,
and as (to use a vulgar phrase) he struck it
fat or lean, he could have zigzagged fairly
towards an easy end, and felt no obligation
to make the air vocal with his lamentations.
The mood of levity, of "I don't care," is
for this world's ills a sovereign and practical
anaesthetic. But no! something deep down
in Teufelsdrockh and in the rest of us tells

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 25

US that there is a spirit in things to which we
owe allegiance and for whose sake we must
keep up the serious mood, and so the inner
fever and discord also are kept up for
Nature taken on her visible surface reveals
no such spirit, and beyond the facts of Nature
we are at the present stage oi our inquiry
not supposing ourselves to look.

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sin-
cerely to confess to }^ou that this real and
genuine discord seems to me to cany
with it the inevitable bankruptcy of nat-
ural religion naively and simply taken.
There were times when Leibnitzes with
their heads buried in monstrous wigs could
compose Theodicies,. and when stall-fed
officials of an established church could
prove by the valves in the heart and the
round ligament of the hip-joint the exist-
ence of a " Moral and Intelligent Con-

26 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

triver of the World." But those times are
past; and we of the nineteenth century, with
our evolutionary theories and our mechan-
ical philosophies, already know nature too
impartially and too well to worship unre-
servedly any god of whose character she
can be an adequate expression. Truly all
we know of good and beauty proceeds from
nature, but none the less so all we know of
evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and in-
difference, a moral multiverse, as one might
call it, and not a moral universe. To such
a harlot we owe no allegiance ; with her as
a whole we can establish no moral com-
munion ; and we are free in our dealings
with her several parts to obey or destroy,
and to follow no law but that of prudence
in coming to terms with such of her partic-
ular features as will help us to our private
ends. If there be a divine Spirit of the

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 27

universe, Nature, such as we know her,
cannot possibly be its ultimate ivord X.Q man.
Either there is no spirit revealed in nature,
or else it is inadequately revealed there ;
and (as all the higher religions have as-
sumed) what we call visible nature, or this
world, must be but a veil and surface-show
whose full meaning resides in a supplemen-
tary unseen or other world.

I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on
the whole a gain (though it may seem for
certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss)
that the naturalistic superstition, the worship
of the god of nature simply taken as such
should have begun to loosen its hold upon
the educated mind. In fact, if I am to ex-
press my personal opinion unreservedly, I
should say (in spite of its sounding blas-
phemous at first to certain ears) that the
initial step towards getting into healthy

28 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

ultimate relations with the universe is the
act of rebellion against the idea that such a
God exists. Such rebellion essentially is
that which in the chapter quoted a while
ago Carlyle goes on to describe:

" ' Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and
whimper, and go cowering and trembling ? Despicable
biped ! ... Hast thou not a heart ; canst thou not suffer
whatsoever it be ; and, as a Child of Freedom, though out-
cast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it con-
sumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy
it !' And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire
over my whole soul ; and I shook base Fear away from
me forever. . . .

"Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively
through all the recesses of my being, of my ME ; and
then was it that my whole ME stood up, in native God-
created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest,
the most important transaction in life, may that same
Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view,
be fitly called. The Everlasting No had said : ' Behold,
thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine"; to
which my whole Me now made answer : ' I am not thine,
but Free, and forever hate thee!" "From that hour,"
Teufelsdrockh-Cariyle adds, " I began to be a man."

And our poor friend, James Thomson,
similarly writes :

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 29

" Who is most wretched in this dolorous place ?
I think myself; yet I would rather be
My miserable self than He, than He
Who formed such creatures to his own disgrace.

The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou
From whom it had its being, God and Lord !
Creator of all woe and sin ! abhorred,

Malignant and implacable ! I vow

That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled,
For all the temples to Thy glory built.
Would I assume the ignominious guilt

Of having made such men in such a world."

We are familiar enough in this com-
munity with the spectacle of persons exult-
ing in their emancipation from belief in the
God of their ancestral Calvinism, him who
made the garden and the serpent and pre-
appointed the eternal fires of hell. Some
of them have found humaner Gods to
worship, others are simply converts from
all theology ; but both alike they assure us
that to have got rid of the sophistication of
thinking they could feel any reverence or

30 IS LIFE WOR TH LIVING f

duty towards that impossible idol gave a
tremendous happiness to their souls. Now,
the idol of a worshipful spirit of Nature also
leads to sophistication ; and in souls that
are religious and would also be scientific,
the sophistication breeds a philosophical
melancholy from which the first natural step
of escape is the denial of the idol ; and with
the downfall of the idol, whatever lack of
positive joyousness may remain, there comes
also the downfall of the whimpering and
cowering mood. With evil simply taken as
such, men can make short work, for their
relations with it then are only practical. It
looms up no longer so spectrally, it loses
all its haunting and perplexing significance
as soon as the mind attacks the instances
of it singly and ceases to worry about their
derivation from the " one and only Power."
Here, then, on this stage of mere emanci-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING f 31

pation from monistic superstition, the would-
be suicide may already get encouraging
answers to his question about the worth of
life. There are in most men instinctive
springs of vitality that respond healthily
when the burden of metaphysical and in-
finite responsibility rolls off. The certainty
that you now 7nay step out of life whenever
you please, and that to do so is not blas-
phemous or monstrous, is itself an immense
relief The thousrht of suicide is now no
longer a guilty challenge and obsession.

"This little life is all we must endure.
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure."

says Thomson ; adding, " I ponder these
thoughts, and they comfort me." Meanwhile
we can always stand it for twenty-four hours
longer, if only to see what to-morrow's
newspaper will contain or what the next
postman will bring. But far deeper forces

32 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

than this mere vital curiosity are arousable,
even in the pessimistically-tending mind ;
for where the loving and admiring impulses
are dead, the hating and fighting impulses
will still respond to fit appeals. This evil
which we feel so deeply is something which
we can also help to overthrow, for its
sources, now that no " Substance " or
" Spirit" is behind them, are finite, and we
can deal with each of them in turn. It is,
indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings
and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the
love of life ; they seem, on the contrary,
usually to give it a keener zest. The sover-
eign source of melancholy is repletion.
Need and struggle are what excite and in-
spire us ; our hour of triumph is what
brings the void. Not the Jews of the cap-
tivity, but those of the days of Solomon's
glory are those from whom the pessimistic

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 33

utterances in our Bibles come. Germany,
when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs
of Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps
the most optimistic and ideahstic literature
that the world has seen ; and not till the
French " milliards " were distributed after
1 87 1 did pessimism overrun the country in
the shape in which we see it there to-day.
The history of our own race is one long
commentary on the cheerfulness that comes
with fighting ills. Or take the Waldenses,
of whom I lately have been reading, as ex-
amples of what strong men will endure.
In 1485, a papal bull of Innocent VIII.
enjoined tlieir extermination. It absolved
those who should take up the cross against
them from all ecclesiastical pains and pen-
alties, released them from any oath, legiti-
mized their title to all property which they
might have illegally acquired, and prom-

34 ^S LIFE WORTH LIVING?

ised remission of sins to all who should
kill the heretics.

"There is no town in Piedmont," says a Vaudois
writer, " where some of our brethren have not been put to
death. Jordan Terbano was burnt alive at Susa ; Hippo-
hte Rossiero at Turin ; Michael Goneto, an octogenarian,
at Sarcena ; Vilermin Ambrosio hanged on the Col di
Meano ; Hugo Chiambs, of Fenestrelle, had his entrails
torn from his living body at Turin ; Peter Geymarali of
Bobbio in like manner had his entrails taken out in Luzerne,
and a fierce cat thrust in their place to torture him further ;
Maria Romano was buried alive at Rocca Patia ; Magda-
lena Fauno underwent the same fate at San Giovanni ;
Susanna Michelini was bound hand and foot and left to
perish of cold and hunger on the snow at Sarcena ; Bar-
tolomeo Fache, gashed with sabres, had the wounds filled
up with quicklime, and perished thus m agony at Fenile ;
Daniel Michelini had his tongue torn out at Bobbo for hav-
ing praised God ; James Baridari perished covered with
sulphurous matches which had been forced into his flesh
under the nails, between the fingers, in the nostrils, in the
lips, and all over the body and then lighted ; Daniel Ro-
velli had his mouth filled with gunpowder which, being
lighted, blew his head to pieces ; . . . Sara Rostignol was
slit open from the legs to the bosom, and left so to perish
on the road between Eyral and Luzerna ; Anna Charbon-
nier was impaled, and carried thus on a pike from San
Giovanni to La Torre."*

* Quoted by George E. Waring in his book on Tyrol.

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 35

Und dergleichen mehrf In 1630, the
plague swept away one-half of the Vaudois
population, including fifteen of their seven-
teen pastors. The places of these were
supplied from Geneva and Dauphiny, and
the whole Vaudois people learned French
in order to follow their services. More than
once their number fell by unremitting perse-
cution from the normal standard of twenty-
five thousand to about four thousand. In
1686, the Duke of Savoy ordered the three
thousand that remained to give up their
faith or leave the country. Refusing, they
fought the French and Piedmontese armies
till only eighty of their fighting men re-
mained alive or uncaptured, when they gave
up and were sent in a body to Switzerland.
But in 1689, encouraged by William of
Orange and led by one of their pastor-cap-
tains, between eight hundred and nine hun-

36 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

dred of them returned to capture their old
homes again. They fought their way to
Bobi, reduced to four hundred men in the
first half year, and met every force sent
against them until at last the Duke of Savoy,
giving up his alliance with that abomination
of desolation, Louis XIV., restored them to
comparative freedom. Since which time
they have increased and multiplied in their
barren Alpine valleys to this day.

What are our woes and sufferance com-
pared with these ? Does not the recital of
such a fight so obstinately waged against
such odds fill us with resolution against our
petty powers of darkness, machine politi-
cians, spoilsmen, and the rest ? Life is worth
living, no matter what it bring, if only such
combats may be carried to successful ter-
minations and one's heel set on the tyrant's
throat. To the suicide, then, in his sup-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING f 37

posed world of multifarious and immoral
Nature, you can appeal, and appeal in the
name of the very evils that make his heart
sick there, to wait and see his part of the
battle out. And the consent to live on,
which you ask of him under these circum-
stances, is not the sophistical '' resignation"
which devotees of cowering religions preach.
It is not resignation in the sense of licking
a despotic deity's hand. It is, on the con-
trary, a resignation based on manliness and
pride. So long as your would-be suicide
leaves an evil oi his own unremedied, so long
he has strictly no concern with evil in the
abstract and at large. The submission
which you demand of yourself to the gen-
eral fact of evil in the world, your apparent
acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the
conviction that evil at large is none of your
hisiness until your business with your pri-

38 IS LIFE WOR TH LIVING ?

vate particular evils is liquidated and settled
up. A challenge of this sort, with proper
designation of detail, is one that need only
be made to be accepted by men whose nor-
mal instincts are not decayed, and your re-
flective would-be suicide may easily be
moved by it to face life with a certain inter-
est again. The sentiment of honor is a
very penetrating thing. When you and
I, for instance, realize how many innocent
beasts have had to suffer in cattle-cars and
slaughter-pens and lay down their lives
that we might grow up, all fattened and
clad, to sit together here in comfort and
carry on this discourse, it does, indeed, put
our relation to the Universe in a more
solemn light. " Does not," as a young
Amherst philosopher (Xenos Clark, now
dead) once wrote, "the acceptance of a
happy life upon such terms involve a point

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 39

of honor ? " Are we not bound to do some
self-denying service with our lives in return
for all those lives upon which ours are
built ? To hear this question is to answer
it in only one possible way, if one have a
normally constituted heart !

Thus, then, we see that mere instinctive
curiosity, pugnacity, and honor may make
life on a purely naturalistic basis seem
worth living from day to day to men who
have cast away all metaphysics in order to
get rid of hypochondria, but who are re-
solved to owe nothing as yet to religion
and its more positive gifts. A poor half-
way stage, some of you may be inclined
to say ; but at least you must grant it
to be an honest stage ; and no man should
dare to speak meanly of these instincts
which are our nature's best equipment,
and to which religion herself must in

40 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

the last resort address her own peculiar
appeals.

IV.

And now, in turning to what religion
may hav^e to say to the question, I come to
what is the soul of my discourse. Religion
has meant many things in human history,
but when from now onward I use the word
I mean to use it in the supernaturalist
sense, as declaring that the so-called order
of nature that constitutes this world's ex-
perience is only one portion of the total
Universe, and that there stretches beyond
this visible world an unseen world of
which we now know nothing positive,
but in its relation to which the true
significance of our present mundane life
consists. A man's religious faith (what-
ever more special items of doctrine it may

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 41

involve) means for me essentially his faith
in the existence of an unseen order of some
kind in which the riddles of the natural
order may be found explained. In the
more developed religions this world has
always been regarded as the mere scaffold-
ing or vestibule of a truer, more eternal
world, and affirmed to be a sphere of edu-
cation, trial, or redemption. One must in
some fashion die to this world before one
can enter into life eternal. The notion that
this physical world of wind and water,
where the sun rises and the moon sets, is
absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed
at and established thing, is one that we find
only in very early religions, such as that of
the most primitive Jews. It is this natural
religion (primitive still in spite of the fact
that poets and men of science whose good-
will exceeds their perspicacity keep publish-

42 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

ing it in new editions tuned to our con-
temporary ears) that, as I said a while ago,
has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the
opinion of a circle of persons, amongst
whom I must count myself, and who are
growing more numerous every day. For
such persons the physical order of nature,
taken simply as Science knows it, cannot
be held to reveal any one harmonious
spiritual intent. It is mere weather, as
Chauncey Wright called it, doing and un-
doing without end.

Now I wish to make you feel, if I can in
the short remainder of this hour, that we
have a right to believe that the physical
order is only a partial order ; we have a
right to supplement it by an unseen spiritual
order which we assume on trust, if only
thereby life may seem to us better worth
living again. But as such a trust will seem

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 43

to some of you sadly mystical and execrably
unscientific, I must first say a word or two
to weaken the veto which you may con-
sider that Science opposes to our act.

There is included in human nature an
ingrained naturalism and materialism of
mind which can only admit facts that are
actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the
entity called " Science " is the idol. Fond-
ness for the word " scientist " is one of the
notes by which you may know its votaries;
and its short way of killing any opinion that
it disbelieves in is to call it " unscientific."
It must be granted that there is no slight
excuse for this. Science has made such
glorious leaps in the last three hundred
years, and extended our knowledge of
Nature so enormously both in general and
in detail ; men of science, moreover, have
as a class displayed such admirable virtues,

44 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

that it is no wonder if the worshippers of
Science lose their head. In this very Uni-
versity, accordingly, I have heard more
than one teacher say that all the funda-
mental conceptions of truth have already
been found by Science, and that the future
has only the details of the picture to fill in.
But the slightest reflection on the real con-
ditions will suffice to show how barbaric
such notions are. They show such a lack
of scientific imagination, that it is hard to
see how one who is actively advancing any
part of Science can make a mistake so crude.
Think how many absolutely new scientific
conceptions have arisen in our own genera-
tion, how many new problems have been
formulated that were never thought of be-
fore, and then cast an eye upon the brevity
of Science's career. It began with Galileo
just three hundred years ago. Four think-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 45

ers since Galileo, each informing his suc-
cessor of what discoveries his own lifetime
had seen achieved, might have passed the
torch of Science into our hands as we sit
here in this room. Indeed, for the matter
of that, an audience much smaller than the
present one, an audience of some five or
six score people, if each person in it could
speak for his own generation, would carry
us away to the black unknown of the
human species, to days without a document
or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible
that such a mushroom knowledge, such a
growth overnight as this, can represent
more than the minutest glimpse of what
the Universe will really prove to be when
adequately understood ? No ! our Science
is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever
else be certain, this at least is certain : that
the world of our present natural knowledge

46 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

is enveloped in a larger world of some sort
of whose residual properties we at present
can frame no positive idea.

Agnostic positivism, of course, admits
this principle theoretically in the most
cordial terms, but insists that we must not
turn it to any practical use. We have no
right, this doctrine tells us, to dream dreams,
or suppose anything about the unseen part
of the universe, merely because to do so
may be for what we are pleased to call our
highest interests. We must always wait
for sensible evidence for our beliefs; and
where such evidence is inaccessible we must
frame no hypotheses whatever. Of course
this is a safe enough position in abstracto.
If a thinker had no stake in the unknown,
no vital needs, to live or languish according
to what the unseen world contained, a philo-
sophic neutrality and refusal to believe either

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 47

one way or the other would be his wisest
cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not
only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly
unrealizable, where our relations to an al-
ternative are practical and vital. This is
because, as the psychologists tell us, belief
and doubt are living attitudes, and involve
conduct on our part. Our only way, for
example, of doubting, or refusing to believe,
that a certain thing is, is continuing to act
as if it were not. If, for instance, we refuse
to believe that the room is getting cold, we
must leave the windows open and light no
fire just as if it still were warm. If I refuse
to believe that you are worthy of my con-
fidence, I must keep you uninformed of all
my secrets just as if you were ?^;Avorthy
of the same. And similarly if, as the
agnostics tell me, I must not believe that
the world is divine, I can only express that

4S IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

refusal by declining ever to act distinctively
as if it were so, which can only mean act-
ing on certain critical occasions as if it
were not so, or in an unmoral and irrelig-
ious way. There are, you see, inevitable
occasions in life when inaction is a kind of
action and must count as action, and when
not to be for is to be practically against.
And in all such cases strict and consistent
neutrality is an unattainable thing.

And after all, isn't this duty of neutrality
where only our inner interests would lead
us to believe, the most ridiculous of com-
mands? Isn't it sheer dogmatic folly to
say that our inner interests can have no
real connection with the forces that the
hidden world may contain ? In other cases
divinations based on inner interests have
proved prophetic enough. Take Science
herself! Without an imperious inner de-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 49

mand on our part for ideal, logical, and
mathematical harmonies, we should never
have attained to proving that such har-
monies lie hidden between all the chinks
and interstices of the crude natural world.
Hardly a law has been established in
Science, hardly a fact ascertained, that was
not first sought after, often with sweat and
blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence
such needs come from we do not know
we find them in us, and biological psy-
chology so far only classes them with
Darwin's "accidental variations." But the
inner need of believing that this world of
nature is a sign of something more spiritual
and eternal than itself is just as strong and
authoritative in those who feel it, as the
inner need of uniform laws of causation
ever can be in a professionally scientific
head. The toil of many generations has

so IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

proved the latter need prophetic. Why
may not the former one be prophetic, too ?
And if needs of ours outrun the visible
universe, why may not that be a sign that
an invisible universe is there ? What, in
short, has authority to debar us from trust-
ing our religious demands ? Science as
such assuredly has no authority, for she
can only say what is, not what is not ; and
the agnostic " thou shalt not believe with-
out coercive sensible evidence " is simply
an expression (free to any one to make) of
private personal appetite for evidence of a
certain peculiar kind.

Now, when I speak of trusting our relig-
ious demands, just what do I mean by
" trusting " ? Is the word to carry with it
license to define in detail an invisible world
and to anathematize and excommunicate
those whose trust is different? Certainly

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 51

not ! Our faculties of belief were not pri-
marily given us to make orthodoxies and
heresies withal ; they were given us to live
by. And to trust our religious demands
means first of all to live in the light of them,
and to act as if the invisible world which
they suggest were real. It is a fact of human
nature that men can live and die by the help
of a sort of faith that goes without a single
dogma or definition. The bare assurance
that this natural order is not ultimate but a
mere sign or vision, the external staging of
a many-storied universe, in which spiritual
forces have the last word and are eternal ;
this bare assurance is to such men enough
to make life seem worth living in spite of
every contrary presumption suggested by
its circumstances on the natural plane.
Destroy this inner assurance, vague as it is,
however, and all the light and radiance of

52 IS LIFE IVOR TH LIVING f

existence is extinguished for these persons
at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed
look at life, the suicidal mood will then
set in.

And now the application comes directly
home to you and me. Probably to almost
every one of us here the most adverse life
would seem well worth living, if we only
could be certain that our bravery and pa-
tience with it were terminating and eventu-
ating and bearing fruit somewhere in an
unseen spiritual world. But granting we
are not certain, does it then follow that a
bare trust in such a world is a fool's para-
dise and lubberland, or rather that it is a
living attitude in which we are free to in-
dulge ? Well, we are free to trust at our
own risks anything that is not impossible
and that can bring analogies to bear in its
behalf. That the world of physics is prob-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 53

ably not absolute, all the converging mul-
titude of arfjuments that make in favor of
idealism tend to prove. And that our whole
physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
atmosphere, a dimension of Being that we
at present have no organ for apprehending,
is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of
the life of our domestic animals. Our dogs,
for example, are in our human life but not of
it. They witness hourly the outward body of
events whose inner meaning cannot, by any
possible operation, be revealed to their in-
telligence, events in which they themselves
often play the cardinal part. My terrier
bites a teasing boy, for example, and the
father demands damages. The dog may be
present at every step of the negotiations, and
see the money paid without an inkhng of
what it all means, without a suspicion that
it has anything to do with Jihu. And he

54 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

never can know in his natural dog's life.
Or take another case which used greatly to
impress me in my medical-student days.
Consider a poor dog whom they are vivi-
secting in a laboratory. He lies strapped
on a board and shrieking at his execution-
ers, and to his own dark consciousness is
literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a
single redeeming ray in the whole business ;
and yet all these diabolical-seeming events
are usually controlled by human intentions
with which, if his poor benighted mind
could only be made to catch a glimpse of
them, all that is heroic in him would relig-
iously acquiesce. Healing truth, relief to
future sufferings of beast and man are to be
bought by them. It is genuinely a process
of redemption. Lying on his back on the
board there he is performing a function in-
calculably higher than any prosperous ca-

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 55

nine life admits of; and yet, of the whole
performance, this function is the one portion
that must remain absolutely beyond his ken.
Now turn from this to the life of man.
In the dog's life we see the world invisible
to him because we live in both worlds. In
human life, although w^e only see our world,
and his within it, yet encompassing both
these worlds a still wider world may be
there as unseen by us as our world is by
him ; and to believe in that world may be
the most essential function that our lives in
this world have to perform. But ** may
be ! may be ! " one now hears the positivist
contemptuously exclaim ; " what use can a
scientific life have for maybes?" Well, I
reply, the " scientific " life itself has much
to do with maybes, and human life at large
has everything to do with them. So far as
man stands for anything, and is productive

56 IS LIFE WORTH LIVIIMCf

or originative at all, his entire vital function
may be said to be to deal with maybes. Not
a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness
or courage is done, except upon a maybe ;
not a service, not a sally of generosity, not
a scientific exploration or experiment or
text-book, that 7nay not be a mistake. It is
only by risking our persons from one hour
to another that we live at all. And often
enough our faith beforehand in an uncerti-
fied result is the only thing that makes the
result come true. Suppose, for instance, that
you are climbing a mountain and have
worked yourself into a position from which
the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have
faith that you can successfully make it, and
your feet are nerved to its accomplishment.
But mistrust yourself, and think of all the
sweet things you have heard the scientists
say oi maybes, and you will hesitate so long

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 57

that, at last, all unstrung and trembling,
and launching yourself in a moment of
despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a
case (and it belongs to an enormous class),
the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to
believe what is in the line of your Jieeds, for
only by the belief is the need fulfilled. Re-
fuse to believe, and you shall indeed be
right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But
believe, and again you shall be right, for
you shall save yourself. You make one or
the other of two possible universes true by
your trust or mistrust, both universes having
been only viaybes^ in this particular, before
you contributed your act.

Now, it appears to me that the question
whether hfe is worth living is subject to
conditions logically much like these. It
does, indeed, depend on you the liver. If
you surrender to the nightmare view and

58 IS LIFE IVOR TH LIVING ?

crown the evil edifice by your own suicide,
you have indeed made a picture totally
black. Pessimism, completed by your act,
is true beyond a doubt, so far as your world
goes. Your mistrust of life has removed
w^hatever worth your own enduring exist-
ence might have given to it ; and now,
throughout the whole sphere of possible
influence of that existence, the mistrust has
proved itself to have had divining power.
But suppose, on the other hand, that instead
of giving way to the nightmare view you
cling to it that this world is not the idtima-
iuni. Suppose you find yourself a very
well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of

" Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith
As soldiers live by courage ; as, by strength
Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas."

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon
you, that your unconquerable subjectivity

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 59

proves to be their match, and that you find
a more wonderful joy than any passive
pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the
larger whole. Have you not now made
life worth living on tJiese terms ? What sort
of a thing would life really be, with your
qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it
only brought fair weather and gave these
higher faculties of yours no scope ? Please
remember that optimism and pessimism are
definitions of the world, and that our own
reactions on the world, small as they are in
bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing,
and necessarily help to determine the
definition. They may even be the decisive
elements in determining the definition. A
large mass can have its unstable equilibrium
overturned by the addition of a feather's
weight. A long phrase may have its sense
reversed by the addition of the three letters

6o IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

, o^ t. This life is worth living, we can
say, since it is what we make it, from the
vi07'al point of view, and we are determined
to make it from that point of view, so far as
we have anything to do with it, a success.

Now, in this description of faiths that
verify themselves I have assumed that our
faith in an invisible order is what inspires
those efforts and that patience of ours that
make this visible order good for moral men.
Our faith in the seen world's goodness
(goodness now meaning fitness for success-
ful moral and religious life) has verified it-
self by leaning on our faith in the unseen
world. But will our faith in the unseen
world similarly verify itself? Who knows ?

Once more it is a case of maybe. And
once more maybes are the essence of the
situation. I confess that I do not see why
the very existence of an invisible world

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? 6i

may not In part depend on the personal re-
sponse which any one of us may make to
the religious appeal. God himself, in short,
may draw vital strength and increase of very
being from our fidelity. For my own part,
I do not know what the sweat and blood
and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean
anything short of this. If this life be not a
real fight, in which something is eternally
gained for the Universe by success, it is no
better than a game of private theatricals
from which one may withdraw at will. But
\t feels like a real fight; as if there were
something really wild in the Universe which
we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses,
are needed to redeem. And first of all to
redeem our own hearts from atheisms and
fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved uni-
verse our nature is adapted. The deepest
thing in our nature in this Binnenleben (as

62 IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?

a German doctor lately has called it), this
dumb region of the heart in which we
dwell alone with our willingnesses and un-
willingnesses, our faiths and fears. As
through the cracks and crannies of subter-
ranean caverns the earth's bosom exudes its
waters, which then form the fountain-heads
of springs, so in these crepuscular depths
of personality the sources of all our outer
deeds and decisions take their rise. Here
is our deepest organ of communication with
the nature of things; and compared with
these concrete movements of our soul all
abstract statements and scientific arguments,
the veto, for example, which the strict posi-
tivist pronounces upon our faith, sound to
us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For
here possibilities, not finished facts, are the
realities with which we have actively to
deal; and to quote my friend William Salter,

IS LIFE WOR TH LIVING f 63

of the Philadelphia Ethical Society, **as
the essence of courage is to stake one's life
on a possibility, so the essence of faith is
to believe that the possibility exists."

These, then, are my last words to you :
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is
worth living, and your belief will help create
the fact. The "scientific proof" that you
are right may not be clear before the day
of judgment (or some stage of Being which
that expression may serve to symbolize) is
reached. But the faithful fighters of this
hour, or the beings that then and there will
represent them, may then turn to the faint-
hearted, who here decline to go on, with
words like those with which Henry IV.
greeted the tardy Crillon after a great vic-
tory had been gained : '* Hang yourself,
brave Crillon ! we fought at Arques, and
you were not there."